For Dave Schultzer, a New York beer retailer, his first trip to the Great American Beer Festival (GABF) in Denver was in a word, “overwhelming.”

Schultzer, who for the past 18 years has operated Bellport Cold Beer and Soda, a beer store with more than a thousand different bottles, in Bellport, Long Island, spent more time during his inaugural Sept. 24 visit to America’s biggest beer talking with the brewery people he’s gotten to know over the years than he did tasting beer.

Schultzer was one of some 60,000 people expected to descend on GABF this year, the largest three-day crowd in the event’s 33-year history. Tickets, released in July, sold out within an hour.

As he made his way into the sprawling exhibition hall of the Colorado Convention Center, Schultzer took note of the space’s enormity— and the plethora of bearded gents in black shirts, the defacto uniform of many craft brewery workers. “I’ve never been in a beer event anywhere near the size and scale of this thing.”

But Schultzer was unperturbed by what might lay ahead. Over the course of nearly five hours during the first of four GABF sessions, Schultzer crisscrossed the convention center’s exposition hall, the size of 10 football fields, dozens of times. “That’s a massive amount of space to cover,” he noted.

Yet, over five hours he sampled only two dozen brews of the 3,500 available while taking14 selfies with brewing industry folks on his iPhone.

The reason, he explained, was his need to re-connect with brewery owners that he helped in bringing their products t0 Long Island. He also visited with his friends from Long Island breweries. Among those he connected with were Sam Calagione of Dog Fish Head of Milton, Delaware, Scott Vaccarro of Captain Lawrence Brewing, Jeremy Cowan of Schmaltz Brewing, and Eric Wallace of Left Hand Brewing, of Longmont, Colorado. And he made new friends, too, among them Hugh Lewis of (512) Brewing Co. of Austin, Texas.

Left Hand’s Chris Lennert and Schultzer

“That’s the fun of the show for me,” he noted, adding, “There’s so much to see and when you know a lot of people, you allot time for seeing them, but you end up with not a lot of time for yourself.”